Obama in personal phone call to Sandra Fluke: Your parents should be proud

posted at 3:40 pm on March 2, 2012 by Tina Korbe

The president clearly thinks it’s advantageous to keep conservatives preoccupied with his contraception mandate because he sure ensures the topic stays in the spotlight. Today, he did that with a rare personal phone call to Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who earlier this week testified in support of the mandate by saying that she and her peers are “going broke” to buy birth control.

In response to Fluke’s congressional testimony, radio host Rush Limbaugh called the Georgetown coed a “slut” and a “prostitute.” With those comments, he touched off a larger controversy. The DCCC and Emily’s List raised funds off Rush’s comments, while Congressional Democrats immediately demanded that Republican leadership disavow his words. House Speaker John Boehner did so tepidly, calmly calling Limbaugh’s remarks “inappropriate,” while also condemning any attempt to use his provocative rhetoric as a fundraising tool.

Today, Obama decided to weigh in, as well, calling Fluke to praise and encourage her and to say her parents should be proud of her activism.

White House press secretary Jay Carney said, “The president called Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke because he wanted to offer his support, express his disappointment, that she was the subject of an inappropriate personal attack and thank her for exercising her rights as a citizen to speak out on public policy.”

Carney said they spoke “for several minutes. It was a good conversation. Like a lot of people said the personal attacks directed her way are inappropriate. The fact that political discourse has become debased in many ways is bad enough. It’s worse when directed at a private citizen simply expressing her views on a matter of public policy.”

Asked what Obama thought about Limbaugh’s comments, Carney said, “They were reprehensible. They were disappointing. It is reprehensible that those kinds of personal and crude attacks could be leveled at someone like this young law school student who was simply expressing her opinion on a matter of public policy and doing it with a great deal of poise.”

Fluke also relayed the substance of the call to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. (Incidentally, Fluke might not be the wide-eyed, 23-year-old she purports to be; sounds like she had the intention to raise this issue before she ever enrolled at Georgetown.)

(Also, note that, according to the lower third in the video, conservative backlash to the contraception mandate amounts to a “War on Women’s Health.” How far we’ve come from the first days after the mandate, when conservatives more successfully framed the issue as Obama’s “War on Religious Freedom.”)

Amid his reaction though, Rush makes a great point. He says that he has been asked why he was so insulting to Fluke. He responded by making the point that his whole “free contraception” movement, on top of the “rich aren’t paying their fair share” movement is highly insulting to him. He likened it to a woman he didn’t know knocking on his door asking for money for contraception because she wanted to go and have sex with 3 guys that evening. Rush explains:

“Where is it written that when all of a sudden if you want something and don’t have the money for it, somebody else has to pay for it. I think the whole notion of being insulted here – there are a lot of us insulted by this whole idea that is growing throughout the Obama administration, that the people who make this country work are somehow doing their fair share, not paying their fair share, that we have to be punished even more. Here’s the latest example of it.”

Of course he ends the segment by suggesting, tongue-in-cheek, that he is waiting for Bill Clinton to call Sandra Fluke to see if she’s OK. Ha!

Dare I suggest that, somewhere along the line, this has gotten a bit — to borrow a word from Ron Paul — “silly“? Don’t misunderstand me: The contraception mandate is very, very serious. As conservatives have said from Day One, it represents an unconscionable assault on religious freedom. Similarly, sexual morality is a very serious issue. But this has become nothing more than a top-my-trauma contest, in which both sides attempt to make it sound as though they’ve been more seriously insulted than the other side.

Let’s not forget who started all of this. Nobody ever threatened to take away anybody’s contraception. Nobody (except George Stephanopoulous) was even talking about contraception until the administration reiterated its mandate to religiously-affiliated employers to provide insurance coverage that covers contraception against their religious beliefs.

The president knew what he was doing when he made the contraception mandate the first detail of Obamacare to be truly “felt.” He was willing to risk that it would rouse religious leaders because he knew it would rouse those who would perceive opposition to the mandate as a threat to consequence-free sex. It’s not — with or without the mandate, any two consenting adults are free to have sex and with contraception as much as they can afford — but don’t tell Sandra Fluke that. To her and to others like her, sex is apparently not consequence-free unless it’s also flat-out “free” for the folks having it.

The best bet for conservatives is to try — somehow — to rise above this fray and to espouse a higher, better way. That necessarily entails advocating conscience protections for religious employers and patiently, repeatedly explaining that contraception is widely accessible and affordable, but not a medical necessity. It might also entail (and I duck as I write this) the willingness to love women (and men!) by inviting them to lives as something other than moochers who can’t see past their own desires for instant gratification. “Hey, kids, try a life of personal responsibility and earned success! You might like it!”

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They’re not. The taxes I pay are. Look. You want to throw out a barb equating a military pension to welfare again? Be my guest. Just don’t act like you didn’t, again. Because you know it’s a stupid comparison, again. And then back down from your point, again. You want to make a statement, have the testicockles to make it.

For the commentator who disagree with my post about Ace of Spades, give me some specific examples of when the underbloggers on his website disagree with Ace on anything. I’m assuming he pays them to post there, and thus don’t want to upset the guy who pay them by disagreeing with him.

In my view, Ace is a very strident pundit, and kind of a blowhard. Just b/c you used to be a liberal doesn’t mean you are more persausive in your arguments. If this Ace guy was being honest, he’d probably admit it was at least partly due to Rush that he moved away from liberalism. He got Rush’s arguments either directly or indirectly from other conservatives who listened to Rush, and thus, he moved to the right.

Ace also asserted he coulld tell a Fluke is a slut joke that is actually funny if he wanted to, while asserting Rush’s joke wasn’t funny. Let’s hear the joke, Ace. If you are so witty, put it out there and let us decide if it’s funny. Anybody can claim to be great at humor. but if you are blogging in obscurity for the most part, it may be b/c you are not really that witty or funny.

Had Rush simply and correctly called the professional student a leech and a mooch, this would be a whole different debate.

MidniteRambler on March 3, 2012 at 11:38 AM

I have to agree, even though I understand the point Rush is making and believe technically speaking his point is sound. I’d like to see him walk this back, just a tad, and go with the leech and mooch argument as you so aptly put it.

A woman goes in front of congress and pleads for birth control to be provided for her. Sorry, but she brought all this criticism upon herself.

Rose on March 3, 2012 at 11:54 AM

It’s only just begun. Wait until the leaks begin. Who prepped her for her testimony. Who paid her way. How was her timing so perfect for support of Barry’s mandate. Who supported her scholarship application to Georgetown. The drips and dribbles will begin soon.

Not offended. Embarrassed for you really. Afraid or incapable of carrying your point to it’s logical conclusion. You certainly have managed to avoid answering why liberals are incapable of providing for themselves though. Why do they need the government so much. They can’t survive it seems, without it.

Not offended. Embarrassed for you really. Afraid or incapable of carrying your point to it’s logical conclusion. You certainly have managed to avoid answering why liberals are incapable of providing for themselves though. Why do they need the government so much. They can’t survive it seems, without it.

hawkdriver on March 3, 2012 at 12:02 PM

Liberals want the government to pay for everything because they want the government to control everything.

I was listening to Rush at the time when he made his comments. He didn’t call Sandra Fluke a “slut” and “prostitute” because she was having so much sex that she was going broke… His argument was, if a woman wants somebody else to PAY for her to have sex, doesn’t that make her a slut and a prostitute?

I haven’t heard an answer to that question yet.

JohnD13 on March 3, 2012 at 11:03 AM

That’s right.

Also, early on in his show, before he said much about Fluke, Rush said that what he was about to say was going to make the uproar over his “phony soldier” flap with Harry Reid pale by comparison. As I recall, he also said some people had advised him against getting into it at all.

This suggests to me that what Rush said, including his choice of words, was no “unforced error”. Far from it. It was a calculated judgment thought out in advance. Rush set out to attract as much enemy fire as he possibly could, in order to put the national spotlight on the matter. And of course he would not have done that if he were not very certain that he was going to win, just as he ended up winning the “phony soldier” flap with Harry Reid.

I’m betting the Bamster’s going to rue the day he allowed himself to get sucked into Rush’s web.

It’s only just begun. Wait until the leaks begin. Who prepped her for her testimony. Who paid her way. How was her timing so perfect for support of Barry’s mandate. Who supported her scholarship application to Georgetown. The drips and dribbles will begin soon.

Yoop on March 3, 2012 at 12:01 PM

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Heh, and dollar to donut says Rush had this info in his back pocket before he opened his show.

At first she was just a ’23 year old coed’. Then she was a ’23 year old coed who also happened to be a ‘reproductive rights activist’. Then she was a ’23 year old coed who also happened to be a ‘reproductive rights activist’ who carefully investigated Georgetown’s policies and decided to enroll specifically to fight the University over contraception insurance.

And now? The ’23 year old coed’ who also happened to be a ‘reproductive rights activist’ who carefully investigated Georgetown’s policies and decided to enroll specifically to fight the University over contraception insurance turns out to be………….30 years old.

Street theater like this used to be so much more effective before there was an internet that people knew how to use. It’s getting harder all the time to keep the narrative simple, and effective, and getting the results you want before people figure out they’ve been had.

But again, why do you have so much trouble breaking this dependancy on the government?

hawkdriver on March 3, 2012 at 12:45 PM

I can see that, despite your MANY admirable qualities, you never learned to think for yourself. It’s understandable.

Bloated drug addicts shouldn’t tell you what to think. See, it’s cheaper to pay for contraception on the front end than pay for unwanted pregnancies on the back end. It’s business, Jim. I don’t expect you to understand.

I’m betting the Bamster’s going to rue the day he allowed himself to get sucked into Rush’s web.

petefrt on March 3, 2012 at 12:26 PM

Definitely. Rush should start Monday’s show with all the people who have NOT had a personal call from the President of the United States. All the military heros, flood victims, tornado victims, Intel scholarship winners and on and on.

Instead, Obama chooses to personally call a 30 year old liberal activist and tells her “her parents should be proud?” At 30? Seriously?

Funny answer. What do bloated drug addicts have to do with otherwise intelligent people being unable to figure out how to pay for their own contraceptives? As far as not understanding basic business, I do understand that the activities I like that don’t reconcile themselves within the budget, take a back seat to things my family actually needs. It’s not much more complicated than that unless you’re trying to rationalize how to get someone else to pay for things for you.

See, it’s cheaper to pay for contraception on the front end than pay for unwanted pregnancies on the back end.

KeninCT on March 3, 2012 at 12:54 PM

How’s that working out for Social Security and Medicare?

Fact: There were 159.4 workers for each Social Security recipient in 1940.

Fact: There were 16.5 workers for each Social Security recipient in 1950.

Fact: There were 5.1 workers for each Social Security recipient in 1960.

Fact: There were 3.7 workers for each Social Security recipient in 1970.

Fact: There were 3.2 workers for each Social Security recipient in 1980.

Fact: There were 3.4 workers for each Social Security recipient in 1990.

Fact: There were 3.4 workers for each Social Security recipient in 2000.

Fact: There were 3.3 workers for each Social Security recipient in 2005.

Fact: There were only 1.75 full-time private-sector workers in the United States in 2010 for each person receiving benefits from Social Security, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Social Security Board of Trustees?

President Obama won the Moderates and Liberals last time around. You do the math.

chumpThreads on March 3, 2012 at 10:56 AM

And according to the network your Hero Rachel Maddow works at, he also set a new record by winning 70% of the votes of high school dropouts. That Inconvenient Truth was so damning that MSDNC actually scrubbed their 2008 exit polls from their website, with help from their Leftist friends at Google.

However, you can still find CNN’s 2008 exit polling, which likewise showed O’bama handily winning the high school dropout vote. They had him winning 61%.

You must be so proud of that achievement. It had never happened before.

So it was President Obama who prompted Rush Limbaugh to call a slut, a slut…

chumpThreads on March 3, 2012 at 12:21 PM

That’s a deliberate misquote. I wrote no such thing. Are you really so intellectually dishonest?

What part of slut are you having trouble with?

*snip*

Roy Rogers on March 3, 2012 at 12:33 PM

Neither you nor Limbaugh nor anyone else on this thread have any basis for calling the woman a slut. Zero. You don’t know her and you don’t know anything about her personal life other than she uses birth control.

As with the compulsory ultrasound laws, “slut shaming” a woman is a form of ritual humiliation intended to shut her up and keep her in line. The unrestrained gusto with which Hot Airians have indulged in such practice is really quite disappointing.

Neither you nor Limbaugh nor anyone else on this thread have any basis for calling the woman a slut. Zero. You don’t know her and you don’t know anything about her personal life other than she uses birth control.

chumpThreads on March 3, 2012 at 1:40 PM

I’m sorry, she put herself on a public stage declaring that sex is so important to her and her fellow female classmates that the burden of buying their own birth control is just too much and they want others to pay for it.

Plus, the left glorifies sex and encourages it. I see no reason for Fluke to be offended. She was called what the left encourages women to be anyway.

Neither you nor Limbaugh nor anyone else on this thread have any basis for calling the woman a slut. Zero. You don’t know her and you don’t know anything about her personal life other than she uses birth control.

And according to the network your Hero Rachel Maddow works at, he also set a new record by winning 70% of the votes of high school dropouts. That Inconvenient Truth was so damning that MSDNC actually scrubbed their 2008 exit polls from their website, with help from their Leftist friends at Google.

However, you can still find CNN’s 2008 exit polling, which likewise showed O’bama handily winning the high school dropout vote. They had him winning 61%.

You must be so proud of that achievement. It had never happened before.

Del Dolemonte on March 3, 2012 at 1:36 PM

So what’s your point? High school dropouts shouldn’t be allowed to vote?

With all due respect (and by that I mean none) you are without question one of the most grasping, ignorant and least relevant people who comment here.

I think I put you on “ignore” previously, but I’m now cranking it up to “in perpetuity throughout the universe forever” ignore.

she put herself on a public stage declaring that sex is so important to her and her fellow female classmates that the burden of buying their own birth control is just too much and they want others to pay for it.

Plus, the left glorifies sex and encourages it. I see no reason for Fluke to be offended. She was called what the left encourages women to be anyway.

Neither you nor Limbaugh nor anyone else on this thread have any basis for calling the woman a slut. Zero. You don’t know her and you don’t know anything about her personal life other than she uses birth control.

So what’s your point? High school dropouts shouldn’t be allowed to vote?

With all due respect (and by that I mean none) you are without question one of the most grasping, ignorant and least relevant people who comment here.

I think I put you on “ignore” previously, but I’m now cranking it up to “in perpetuity throughout the universe forever” ignore.

And please don’t respond. I want to ignore you just as you are.

chumpThreads on March 3, 2012 at 1:50 PM

LOL, Saul Alinsky taught you well. A+

Your squealing like a stuck pig, which I have bolded, proves that I just scored a direct hit. You can’t refute any of the facts I cite, so admit it by calling me names. That’s Elite Leftism 101, and it’s an utter joke.

Before the 2008 election, you Democrats kept strutting about and pounding your chests telling us how “smart” O’bama was. This despite the fact that we’ve never seen any of his academic paper trail. I even saw one article at the time crowing over how O’bama was “winning the High IQ Vote”.

And after O’bama was elected in 2008, your side of the aisle orgasmed over stuff like this (which I found on CBS):

When comparing the vote-by-state with the states with the highest percentage of advanced degrees, the top 16 states were all Obama states.

After that 2008 election, all of those exit polling numbers were freely available out there, and that is how I found the MSNBC exit polling showing that O’bama set a new record with 70% of the high school dropout vote. But the Democrat media never told us about that particular exit polling result, because it didn’t fit their Template. Telling us that O’bama won the votes of advanced degree holders did fit their Template, so they ran with it.

The fact that MSNBC later scrubbed those results proves just how damning they were to your side. And that irrefutable fact is why you’re reduced to sputtering and calling me names, simply because you have absolutely no credible response. As I said, Saul Alinsky taught you very well.

BTW, Hot Gas doesn’t have an “ignore” feature, so you’re stuck with me. Now back to Oz with you.

Chistopher Buckley, the son of William F Buckley, Jr, is voting for Obama, because Obama is smarter than McCain and Palin.

“I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves.”

Bet Rush’s staff is working over time this weekend to put together a montage of awful things that have been said about conservative women. Can’t wait till Jake Tapper asks that bespectacled buffoon masquerading as Obama’s communications director if the president will be returning Bill Maher’s million bucks since he called Sarah Palin a c*nt and the president is — apparently — opposed to that kind of “incendiary” rhetoric. Or he’ll ask if the president will at least be calling Sarah Palin to commiserate. And don’t think Tapper won’t ask, either. He will. The hypocrisy is just too, too thick to let it pass.

That’s the idea though, right? We’re to the point where we subsidize every aspect of a liberal’s needs in life because they claim they can’t manage it without the government kicking in some coin. Now we’re being asked to subsidize their leisure time too.

I have slowly been coming to the conclusion that Rush may cause the downfall of the Republican party, not that it would be missed at this point,

I say this as someone who agrees with Rush more than I disagree, but as much as he says he is not creating mind numbed robots, I think he is creating mind numbed robots.

Rush is usually effective at illustrating the absurd, by being more absurd, I get that, it seems to me that the problem is every ditto head thinks they can do the same thing. Rush can drive home a point in a one sided conversation with parody, humor, absurd observations, and it affirms what his listeners already believe, but does nothing to advance an idea, inspire thought or teach people why small gubament is better than big gubament.

Again, I AGREE with Rush more than I disagree with him, but I have seen many examples of ditto heads in action, that initially made me stop listening to his show and have led me to the conclusion that Rush is now more damaging to conservatism than helpful.

Two much abbreviated ditto head moments that contributed to my thinking:

I was sitting in a barber shop waiting for a hair cut, the news was on, ditto head watching news trying to do his best to “illustrate the absurd” and prove that the national media is biased, he thought he was funny, nobody else did, he left and some one said they may vote D in the next election just to ruin the guy’s day.

In line at the post office, ditto head being helped doesn’t like that he had to wait in line, that there was no sense of urgency from the lady at the counter, spurts out something to the effect of the only reason you femi nazis want socialized medicine is so there will be more union jobs.

Both time the ditto heads thought they were making a point by being funny, but lost the any credibility and effectively the argument.

The EIB school (or whatever he calls it) only offers affirmation to those who already have a conservative bent, I am not sure that is what the country needs.

And now instead of discussing the real issue at hand, gubament mandates, we have spent five days, 16 pages, and whatever else distracted, because Rush was trying to affirm his listeners instead of advance conservative, small gubament ideas.